AustLit

Author's note: The South Australian writer Carole Lefevre tells a story about overhearing a conversation at Adelaide Writers’ Week about the frustrations of buying a novel only to discover it is set in Adelaide. As if, so known, so familiar, so prosaic is Adelaide, that anywhere else in the world might provide a better context for fiction. But when I moved to the Adelaide Hills eight years ago, what struck me was how fantastic they are—fantastic in Tzvetan Todorov’s sense of the term as a hovering in uncertainty about what is and isn’t real. The fantastic seems inbuilt in the architecture of the Adelaide Hills. Ubiquitous castles commemorate colonial fantasies of an aristocratic future making real a past that never happened. Miss Hares abound; quaint, antiquated, fustian eccentrics that belie Adelaide’s semblance of genteel devotion to the commonplace. (I hear the protests!). The dark record of the past seems never to have stained these ‘picturesque’ Hills and yet once the mist falls, the gothic looms. Greyson, the melancholic narrator of this passage, enters the novel in a present porous to a long dead past, its protagonists long gone and yet who is that girl slipping in and out of the mist on the far side of the lake?